


Short Stories - 2014

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Drabble Collection, Ficlet Collection, Gen, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-03-04 16:54:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3074780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Assorted ficbits and meme responses from the year, all put together in one place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Short Stories - 2014

**Author's Note:**

> So there I was at the end of the year, kicking my feet, feeling vaguely unsatisfied with my fic turn-out for 2014, except eventually I realized that just because I didn't post polished, finished pieces doesn't mean I DIDN'T write.
> 
> And since an accomplishment is an accomplishment no matter how small, I decided to put together all the little ficbits I did.
> 
> These are largely Tumblr meme responses, spare bits that I discarded off of other fics, and things that were simply too short to justify making their own AO3 post. ALL OF IT IS RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT. FAIR WARNING.

-

 

 **01\. August.**  
 _Nina & Kieren, gen, no warnings apply._ This was actually the very first thing I wrote for this fandom, like, two days after finishing the show. Nina and Oliver, btw, are the Halperin & Weston representatives/gravediggers from 2x06. Nina is """not a breakfast person""".

 

When Nina comes in, the Shepherd is braced elbows on knees, his head hung low and heavy. She stays in front of the door until it falls shut, the magnetized lock thunking into place, and he looks up -- his ghost-colored eyes instantly become the brightest thing in the room.

They watch each other. Nina swallows, and waits to see how he'll bargain. Those are her orders: to say next to nothing, to let him dig his own grave (Oliver laughed at that one, teeth on show, like nobody had ever made that joke before.)

It was, after all, imperative that Halperin & Weston remove Kieren Walker from Roarton. His connection with the PDS community there is too strong, given his significance to their kind as a whole -- which really is Victus Party's own fault. What you expecting when you take a marginalized group and force them to congregate for long hours of the day with nothing better to do than perform menial labor and get to know each other? Of _course_ the Roarton Risen are going to be inconveniently loyal.

After a long moment, he leans back. He drags a deep breath in through his nose, holds it, and sighs.

Finally, he says, "It gets all over your collar, doesn't it?"

What.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Your cover-up," he gestures. "You have to put it on everything that shows, right, otherwise the shades don't match. So at the end of the day you have this -- this _dusting_ all over the collars of your shirts from where it's come off. And your wrists, too, because you can't do your face and then just _not_ do your hands."

Nina tucks her hands behind her back.

"And my sister had this really nice stuff -- 24 hour, doesn't wash off -- but the NHS doesn't cover that. Just the cheap brand for us, right?"

"I don't know …" she trails off, glancing reflexively at the glass.

The Shepherd's expression changes, and she braces herself for the awful thing that's going to come out of his mouth next, that damning, _You_ are _PDS, aren't you?_ and she'll have to spend the next few days eating where her coworkers can see her and pretending to be in pain when she gets a paper-cut.

Instead, his eyebrows only shift upward, then settle back down. He shrugs and says, "Anyway, I don't think I realized how much it annoyed me until I stopped doing it."

"Why?"

He gives her a dry look. "Everybody knew what I was regardless of whether I covered up or not."

"They say you're one of the First Risen."

He shrugs again -- it's elegant, full-bodied, and not at all as jerky as Nina expects, as her own shrugs are. That's the thing about being PDS: your hearts don't beat, your blood flow's near non-existent, and without oxygen, your muscles are nowhere near as responsive as they once were. Nina doesn't shrug anymore, and she definitely doesn't run. But the Shepherd shrugs like a teenager, like it's fucking eloquence.

How old had he been when he died?

"Apparently," he gestures again, chains clanking. "I don't know, I didn't do it on purpose."

 

-

 

 **2\. August.**  
 _Jem, OC, background Kieren/Simon, warnings for PTSD mentions._ More female friendships for Jem, please, show.

 

The door clicks shut behind him, and when Jem looks back, she finds Andrea's lip curled up like she'd just found a short and curly in the public toilet.

"What?" says Jem, her hackles going up.

"Your brother's bumping uglies with a rotter?"

She sounds so incredulous about it that Jem glances through the window involuntarily, like maybe she'd gotten confused and they were actually talking about somebody else. But no, that's Kieren, hands in his pockets, going 'round the hedges by the street corner, his gait stiff like rotters usually are. He lifts his hand to Mrs Moon, who's coming from the other direction in her car. Beside him, Simon steps up onto the kerb -- Jem can't see his expression, but she does see Mrs Moon's frosty face, her hands turned talon-like at ten-and-two.

She stops smirking and meets Andrea's eyes again. Andrea taps the end of her biro against the open page of her textbook, somewhere over Charles II's snotty expression. 

Slowly, she points out, "My brother _is_ a PDS sufferer," just in case Andrea … somehow … forgot?

As per their agreement with Jem's therapist, Kieren wears his contacts indoors. The star-shaped pupils and grey-white color of PD-symptomatic eyes are "triggering" to Jem, the therapist said (and Jem thought he made that word up, just for her, given her history, but apparently it's a thing?) After all, Bill Macy always told them that if you got close enough to a rotter to see the whites of their eyes, you might as well just stick your head between your knees and kiss your arse good-bye, and Jem hates, hates, _hates_ herself for thinking that first, for seeing Kieren and thinking _I'm dead_ and _shoot it_ before she registers her brother standing there with his hands held out to her.

Still, everyone in Roarton knows what Kieren is, contacts or no contacts. Most of them had gone to his funeral.

An eye roll is her answer. "I know _that,"_ Andrea drags out. "Seriously, though? Dating?"

"I think so?" Jem teases him nonstop, but they haven't gotten around to having, like, a _discussion_ about it yet. "That's Simon, he's a preacher."

Andrea nods, absorbing this, but she's got bigger things on her mind.

"How does that even _work?"_ she asks, peering at Jem, her expression musing. "How do they bone? Like, do they, you know, _function --"_

The biro hits her squarely between the eyes.

"I don't _know!"_ Jem cries, horrified, and Andrea rubs at the mark on her forehead and leers, which makes Jem clap her hands over her ears to fend off whatever horrible thing she's going to follow it up with. "I don't know! Go to Ishtar's if you really want to find out!"

And that makes Andrea shriek, scandalized, and suddenly, they're both laughing, doubling over and gripping the edges of Jem's table to stay in their chairs.

" _Fuck,"_ says Jem, and kicks at her shins. "What'd you get for #13, then, you terrible tart? Jesus."

 

-

 

**03\. September.**  
 _Kieren/Simon, warnings for surgery mention and possible disordered thinking, re: food._

 

"What made you change your mind?"

Simon blinks. Slowly, he looks sidelong at Kieren, who's resting his head against the doorframe, his arms hooked through each other across his chest. 

He glances back to the button-up he's discarded on the bed and says, droll, "Salmon isn't really my color -- doesn't work with my complexion, don't you think?" and is rewarded with a hike of Kieren's shoulders and a look of deep exasperation that Simon, in company, refers to as Kieren's default expression -- which isn't fair but _is_ funny, because every comment to that regard earns him some variation of this exact look. 

Pleased with himself, Simon smiles down at the tails of his tie.

"I _mean,"_ Kieren corrects, huffing. "When did you decide that life wasn't meaningless?"

Simon knows the answer to that one without having to think about it at all.

 _When I was face-down in those stirrups with my spine dissected, and I realized I didn't want to do this anymore._

To be able to say something like that and back it up, you have to believe that you're worth something -- that at the very least, you're worth the dignity of a choice -- and you're meant to be doing something that isn't this.

But what he says instead is, "When they told me I shouldn't eat anymore," because it's the kinder of two truths. Kieren's eyebrows lift, and he explains, "The lives of the living are never meaningless, Kieren. You eat. You have to find something to eat. You have to make money in order to afford the food you find. If you've no other meaning, no other reason to live, then at the very least you're just killing time until you can next eat. After I Rose, the drive to feed was insatiable, all-consuming." Kieren nods, not needing that part of it explained. "And then, with the neurotryptaline, all that just … went away, and my nihilism with it. I realized I would have to find something else to devour."

He finishes his tie, tugging it to lie flat down his chest.

"And?" Kieren prompts after a beat, following him with his eyes.

"Scripture worked," Simon says, moving. "There's a lot of it to devour." He thinks of what to add. "I devoured a lot of stories about the Rising, too."

He shifts another step so that they're both in the doorway now, and when Kieren steps back to give them space, his shoulder bumps against the frame.

He figures it out then, eyes darting up and widening, and he preempts Simon's cornering him with a " _no"_ and a "don't _say_ it," but it's too late: Simon has him by the neck, hands sliding up to hold his jaw still so that his "and now I've got you," becomes a kiss that Kieren groans into, in a put-upon and long-suffering kind of way.

 

-

 

 **04\. October.**  
 _POV Outsider, Walkers gen, warnings for suicide, blood, and panic attacks._ Sorry, I had this image of Steve holding Kieren eighteen years apart, and I had to inflict it on somebody.

 

 **pamalamb01** (23:21)  
just had the actual worst day

 **vampiricflames** (23:21)  
Awww God Bless What Happened?

 **pamalamb01** (23:30)  
an ambo came out from Roarton Valley (they don't have an A &E out there just a clinic) and we got the call ahead that it was going to be a DOA on an 18yo male.  
(23:31)  
it arrives, but it's wailing lights & sirens and we're all hoping maybe they got him resuscitated. no luck. they rushed because it was the DAD who needed medical attention now. he was losing his shit. which was understandable - from what i pieced together, it was a suicide and he was the one who found the body?  
(23:35)  
so he's sitting in the ambo with the oxygen over his face and it hits me -- I KNOW THIS GUY. I was there eighteen years ago when we delivered this kid: the nurse handed him his baby (his 1st!) and he just looked at him for a moment and then bloody SWOONED. Baby wasn't hurt, but Mum looked at him while we gave him a mask and said: "you're a useless tit, Steve." we LAUGHED about it. it became a JOKE. for a month after, every time we delivered a baby SOMEBODY would ask "was dad another steve?" and we'd all laugh. and then here he was. steve. in front of me today, crying so hard he became an emergency. still holding his baby  
(23:35)  
fuck  
(23:35)  
fuck i hate everything fuck fuck fuck

 

-

 

 **05\. December.**  
 _POV Outsider, no warnings apply, INCOMPLETE._ I have no idea where I was going with this, but I just wanted to play with the idea of Kieren's descendants being all "meh" about the Rising and just absolutely refusing to believe he was anybody important at all. UGH YOUTHS.

 

He's on the stepladder, uselessly trying to untangle the string of blue lights from the white -- they'll have them up by tomorrow at sundown, Mum said, although really no one in Roarton will know the significance, but Uncle Gem says that you have to be bold about what you are, and that's always stuck with him, _be bold,_ so the lights are going up no matter how big the knot -- when his cousin Tobijah materializes with his tablet in the crook of his elbow and says, "Hey, did you know that Uncle Kieren's famous?"

Ibrahim pauses and frowns, wondering if they're talking about the same uncle. Uncle Kieren isn't really their uncle, of course, he's Ibrahim's great-grandmother's older brother, which makes him … whatever to Tobijah, and Ibrahim's only paid him the kind of attention you pay really, really old people -- which is to say, not much at all. Uncle Kieren has a stooped back, ugly ankle socks, and a fine tremor that makes his head shake constantly, so he always struck Ibrahim as disapproving even though he probably wasn't. Mum says it's Parkinson's, but not to mention this in front of Uncle Kieren. _Don't tell him he's got a disease,_ she tells them. _Any disease. He won't like that._

He can't imagine him as anything but what he is: really, _really_ old. "For what?"

"Something during the Rising." Curious, but also, like, a hundred years ago or whatever. Ibrahim flips the tail end of the tangle towards him, trying to get him to help. "They've got videos of his speeches -- or something -- but I can't get around the parental locks."

"How come we've never heard about it?"

Tobijah shrugs. The blue lights are beginning to V away from the white, finally, forming separate trails down to the floor. "Dunno."

 

-

 

 **06\. October.**  
 _POV Outsider, Kieren/Simon/Amy, no warnings apply._ There was a post on Tumblr that was like "PLEASE CONSIDER YOUR OT3 TRYING TO STOP EACH OTHER FROM BUYING UGLY FURNITURE" and I may have tripped a little bit. Also season finale, what season finale.

 

Chenille and the other sales associates simply refer to it as “the Mess” — a corner sectional sofa with vibrant upholstery, patterned with an eyecatching hibiscus print in oranges, reds, and yellows. It used to be part of a whole matching ensemble, but as the pieces sold, it remained, looking more and more peculiar as newer model furniture filled in the displays around it.

Two years later, the Mess sits by itself in the no-man’s land by the loo, its price slashed nearly 60%, and Chenille’s sales team leader promised a £50 Boots gift card to the associate that could finally get it to walk off.

So when, mid-rush on a Saturday afternoon, Chenille stops, takes stock, and sees a woman in a chartreuse peacoat and bright, pumpkin-orange skirts standing in front of the Mess, she shoots straight for her like she’s been fired like an arrow. You don’t argue with a £50 gift card to anywhere, not in the post-Rising economy.

"Hello!" she choruses at her back, fixing on a smile and clasping her hands. "Are you finding everything all right?"

The woman turns, and Chenille’s stomach drops out in shock.

It’s not that she hasn’t seen PDS sufferers before, of course. It’s just, she’s never had one come into the store — furniture, she supposes, isn’t particularly high on their lists of need-to-buy. She went to the same “Understanding PDS” seminar every big business in the city required their employees to attend, but that was years ago, when they first started reintegrating, and the only thing she really remembers is that PDS sufferers were supposed to be wearing cover-up and therefore should be hard to spot.

This woman doesn’t have any cover-up on at all. She looks at her with torn-up pupils and colorless irises and waits a beat for Chenille to recover before saying, “Which one of these tags is the final price?”

"Uhh," says Chenille intelligently. Fortunately, her hands move for her with the ease of having been in retail most of her natural life, pulling the tags back to show her the most recent mark-down. "This one."

Her eyebrows hike up. “That’s a really good deal!”

"It’s an older model from one of our best brand names," Chenille demurs, because honestly, it’s the nicest thing that can be said about the Mess. "We have to clearance them out once they’re a few years out of date."

"That’s all right, innit," she says. "I’m a few years out of date myself." 

She doesn’t give Chenille a chance to decide if she should go ahead and laugh at that, reaching out instead to run her fingers over the sectional back, tracing the petals of the most prominent hibiscus flower. 

"My nan died during the Rising, left me all her stuff," she spares a wry look over her shoulder. "And you know how nans are, yeah. Her sofa’s older than I am! The stuffing’s coming out of the poor thing everywhere, so now that we’ve got traffic coming through our place at all hours, it’s time we got ourselves something gorgeous. Something _us!”_

The way she says it, with the kind of brightness that — there’s really no other way to put it — matches the cheery colors of her outfit, coming out of her in beams, and Chenille feels a flush of sudden warmth for this costumer. “You really like it, don’t you?”

The woman pulls her shoulders up, peeking at her with delight. “I do,” she admits, and Chenille’s got it from here. She does her spiel, and when she’s done, the woman’s up on her tiptoes, bouncing, gloved hands clasped in front of her. “I’ll have to ask my husband!” she says, and spins around, skirts swinging, and Chenille watches her leave with a good feeling about that £50.

A few days later, she gets another one — a man this time, white-eyed and unblinking, and mothers tug their children away from him unconsciously.

Chenille’s pretty sure she knows who he must be, judging by the unerring way he finds the Mess and stands in front of it, hands making stony fist-shapes in his pockets. He’s dressed like an undertaker, slick hair and dark suit.

She approaches fearlessly. “Do you like it?”

He turns his whole torso towards her, his eyebrows lifting. In the time he takes to answer, Chenille second-guesses every decision she’s ever made that led her to this point.

"You know," comes out of him — his voice is deep enough to swim in, slow like still water. "I think I do — surprising even me."

He smiles, and she laughs obligingly. He is grey, white, and black: not the kind of person she would expect to find standing in front of a sunshine-colored sectional.

And then he says, “I’ll have to run it by my husband,” and Chenille says “yes, of course,” and thinks, _what._

He leaves, and then, towards the end of a very bemused Chenille’s shift, he returns with the woman in tow; same flouncy, flowery skirt, denim top, her hair swinging behind her. And trailing after them —

He’s younger than Chenille’s youngest, he has to be. Or he looks it. With the PDS, she supposes, you can’t really be sure. He’s wearing a jacket over a hoodie that people in Chenille’s line of business would call a dark shade of paprika, surprisingly not awful on so young a fellow, and when she nears them, she hears him say, “— know why you needed me to see it. I have no strong feelings about it.”

The man says something, low, but the woman’s voice carries further. “How can you _not_ have strong feelings, Kieren Walker? Look at it! It’s _perfect!”_

"It’s a mess," he returns flatly.

"You say that like it doesn’t prove our point."

"Hello!" Chenille calls, inserting herself neatly into their group. She smiles to both the man and the woman, and the boy glances up, his eyes as shock-white as theirs. "Can I help you with anything?"

As one, they look to Kieren, the same way — well, the way people look at their husbands to make a decision.

Kieren looks back, and heaves a great sigh. When his gaze shifts to Chenille, she knows she’s won.

 

-

 

 **07\. August.**  
 _Kieren/Simon, past Kieren/Rick, Jem, AU, no warnings apply._ A magic/fantasy AU for banemalec, originally posted [here.](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/post/94965118963/)

 

When Simon from the house of Monroe knelt before the gravewood throne and promised the new king, “I would rip their hearts from their chests and lay them at your feet, if you asked,” Kieren’s hands turned to fists and his stomach lurched downwards, and he knew, he _knew_ he would love this man and it would make him helpless.

Through the woods where the witches lived, behind the trenches and the moat of cast-iron water, there lived the Macys, and loving Richard had been as easy as loving sunlight on the backs of his eyelids, as his own bed, as the sight of his front gate when his feet were aching, but Richard would not declare war for him. Richard's loyalties laid elsewhere, and Kieren’s already had that boy’s heart laid at his feet, entombed in his corpse; a gift for the Walker house.

Simon came as a disciple, but in his wonder he would create Kieren like gods do, if Kieren let him. He would put his supplicant’s hands on Kieren’s heart and that would be that.

He looked across the hall for rescue, finding his sister by the silver of her armor. Her throat moved, and then she put a hand to the hilt of her sword and knelt to the stones.

He closed his eyes. Above his head, gravewood made his roof, his shelter, his crown; twelve fingers of bone-white branches, grown in the twelfth hour of the twelfth day of the twelfth month.

"I don’t want to be king," said the Death-Walker, to whomever might be listening.

 

-

 

 **08\. August.**  
 _Simon/Kieren, ensemble, no warnings apply._ For Salv, who wanted "simon/kieren, confession, despairing, glowing", originally posted [here.](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/post/95166910533/) I want Kieren the reluctant Shepherd so badly it hurts, it's whatever, i'm FINE.

 

The first twelve leave in the spring and go west to the city, covering their heads as wolves among sheep in the presence of the false prophet. The next twelve go south, to Norfolk, and Connie Furness (who was never a joiner) complains bitterly the whole while, saying, “this rubbish isn’t what I clawed my way out of a grave to do,” and nobody points out that she’d be just as miserable staying with her son and Sandra at the B&B, and that’s the _point._ The last group of twelve go east, dodging port authorities and stealing into continental Europe. 

“You don’t have to do this,” the shepherd had told them, gentle, and Binh Nguyen spoke for them all when he replied, “We’re Roarton born and buried, Kieren Walker. We’ve known you your whole life. We will go.”

And thus, when Halperin & Weston come in their suits like somehow that's better than the white coats, and they say, “where are the PDS sufferers with the beating hearts?”, they’re directed to the graveyard. Of forty registered, only two are left: a boy, sitting cross-legged in front of Amy Dyer’s empty grave, drawing flowers on her headstone with the shaking hands indicative of early stage rabidification, and Simon Monroe who puts himself between them, shark-faced and star-eyed, Simon whom they _know._

Meanwhile, far away, a woman with a clipboard says, “what was that, love?” She thinks she’s heard it all — zombies, rotters, dry rot, PDS sufferers, the undead, the Redeemed, but this one’s new.

Zoe lights up, all her features aglow in the way of the truly zealous, and she says like a burn, “We are the Walkers.”

 

-

 

 **09\. October.**  
 _Jem & Kieren, warnings for PTSD mentions._ For Viva, who wanted " the girl in the purple graphic u reblogged a day or so ago, "i am not a coward"", originally posted [here.](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/post/98973193428/)

 

Shirley Wilson fetches her a pamphlet with a half-dozen phone numbers (“here’s one specifically for HVF veterans, love, and this is the toll-free 24/7 line”) and Dr Russo puts down what he’s doing and makes several calls, then lends her his office so she can video-conference her first appointment that same day with a dark-haired woman in Leeds who speaks softly and says things she doesn’t quite believe yet, like, “you are not a coward.”

The kindness is, frankly, exhausting, and Jem feels colorless, washed out by it by the time she returns to the clinic lobby, where Kieren — fuck him very much — is still waiting, asleep across two chairs.

 _Do you think,_ the woman in Leeds had said, _that the problem might by that somebody once told you that violence and guns and hair-trigger instincts — that all of that was supposed to be bravery? Do you think maybe you started to punish yourself when those things didn't make you feel brave? You're not the problem, Jem._

She crouches down and puts her finger over the end of her brother’s nose. She doesn’t think it’s going to work — awareness of minutiae is not, after all, what zombies are known for — but after a minute, Kieren flinches, twitches, and then lifts a hand to slap her away — only to hit himself instead.

"Fuck you,” he says, once he’s done spluttering and she’s done laughing herself sore, but all his teeth are grinning at her and there’s a spot for her, she finds, right underneath his arm, and Jem takes it.

 

-

 

 **10\. October.**  
 _Kieren/Amy/Rick, AU, warnings for internalized homophobia and mentions of physical assault._ For thegreatblogsby, who wanted "kieren/amy/rick, ula commune au" because of the tags on [this post](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/post/98849784679). Originally posted [here.](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/post/99017198033/)

 

They’re peering worriedly into the farmhouse kitchen (which, of course, is devoid of any cooking utensils except those used to make the neurotryptaline derivative, and Amy feels pretty bad about that, honest: she hadn’t realized that their medication would be of the, erm, the homemade variety,) where Kieren’s become a small shape against the far wall, phone cord wrapped around his chest, when Rick suddenly puts his forearm against the doorframe next to her head and tells her, “I don’t actually think Ren should have gone to your school, you know.”

She blinks, and turns her face to him in the gloom.

Kieren's phone conversation is near-inaudible, except for the occasional "sorry, Mum," and, "is Jem still not --"

His jaw tightens, pulling at the stitches, and he mumbles, “I should have said that then, instead of — _he_ knew I didn’t mean — and him knowing mattered more than — but I —”

Amy from a week ago would have agreed instantly — how can anyone love Kieren Walker and not shout it from the rooftops? She wants to _yell,_ she loves him so much, and how can anyone stand to hear him get insulted, belittled, and not stand up for him? — but since then, Gary Kendal has dragged her across her own floor by the hair, and suddenly she has no room in her to judge what other people do to keep themselves safe.

She doesn’t say anything, but she does slip her arm through his, sinking her head against his shoulder and feeling the hard places where they bolted his arm back into its socket. Rick sighs, and lets her.

 

-

 

 **11\. October.**  
 _Amy & Kieren, Firefly AU, no warnings apply._ For Heather, who wanted "In the Flesh, any character/any pairing, Firefly AU because you do those so beautifully", originally posted [here.](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/post/99056350863/) I also just really want you all to imagine Simon as a smarmy border moon preacher, okay? Okay.

 

It’s barely half-eleven and Pearl’s already a-hollerin’ at Macy folk when Amy Dyer goes by the window, close enough to make the hologram flicker, wearing her pea-yellow travel coat with her suitcase in hand, and Kieren drops the drawer he was counting to give chase.

“ _Deng yixia!_ You’re actually going to do it?” he shouts incredulously, catching up, “Some crazy fanatic with a passworded wave on the cortex says he’s got Alliance-grade meds and invites you up to his ‘spaceship’ and you’re just going to … go?”

"Can’t stay here, handsome," she sing-songs back, and then abruptly stops and drops her suitcase in the dirt by her foot, rounding on him to say breathlessly, "Come with me, Kieren — you’ve never been off-planet, have you, never even really left Roarton, I bet — haven’t you ever wondered what’s out there?"

"In the black? Pirates, and Reavers," says Kieren dryly, "I think I’m good with both feet planet-side, thanks," and they look at each other, and when Amy moves, Kieren moves back, and they hold each other tight in the full light of the backwater prairie sun.

 

-

 

 **12\. October.**  
 _Jem, Gary, gen, Hogwarts AU, warnings for one homophobic slur._ A Hogwarts AU for Aino, who wanted "jem walker + fire walk with me" and got overemotional Gryffindors instead of the Twin Peaks she was hoping for. 

 

A shadow falls over the armchair by the fire a second before a weight settles onto its cushioned arm. Jem buries her face further into her knees, hoping Gary’d get the message, but he doesn’t, of course.

"Remember when you were just an ickle firstie," he starts, with a heavy seventh-year wisdom that makes her want to punch him — but she doesn’t, because she wants him to see her face even less. "And you tiptoed everywhere? All the prefects thought you’d been hexed. They even sent an owl to your parents about it."

"Go away, Gus," she tries.

"But it was your brother who figured it out, yeah? You weren’t hexed, you just didn’t want anyone looking at you and you were years away from learning misdirection spells. See, ‘cos you didn’t think you deserved to be in Gryffindor House, that the Sorting Hat got it all wrong and you should be in a coward’s House, which is bollocks because you’re bloody _brilliant,_ Jem, and if there’s anyone who should be in a different House, it’s your twink brother —”

" _Gus,"_ she says, with steel.

"Sorry," says Gary unapologetically. 

A beat passes. The fire crackles and pops, and across the common room, some second years start arguing over a set of Gobstones.

Then Gary asks, "What happened, Jem — what made you confident again?"

She surfaces slowly, damply, and expects Gary to avert his eyes from her face, but he doesn’t. He just watches her steadily as she ventures, “Kier took a pair of my earmuffs and charmed them to play Thrice Cursed’s _Crux of Evil_ album whenever I put them on. Mum never let me listen to them at home — too many mentions of Unforgivables,” she finishes, wetly, smearing at her face with the back of her hand.

"There you go," Gary murmurs, and squeezes her shoulder, punctuating his words with a gentle shake, " _That’s_ your brother. So, to Merlin’s tit with these rumors about Inferi, all right? The next time somebody tries to tell you he’s got involved in that — and _please,_ Kieren Walker, fledgling Dark wizard? I’d be more worried about Amy Dyer’s cat, that thing’s a right bastard — next time, you just hex ‘em.”

"I’m not going to hex them," Jem protests. "I’m not you!"

"Shame," Gary shrugs elaborately, and then brightens. "Say, did I tell you about the spell I put on Philip Wilson — you know, the Slytherin prefect — that made his robes fly up every time he said —"

She rolls her eyes and shoves him off the armchair.

 

-

 

 **13\. October.**  
 _Simon/Kieren, Zoe, Brian, warnings for a suicide/self-harm mention._ For Alex, who wanted "Simon or Simon/Kieren, make-up, mirror, faith", originally posted [here.](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/post/99254414288/)

 

Every morning before work, Kieren Walker takes his eyeliner brush and a palette that Jem lends him and folds down his ears so he can draw a symbol behind each one — a dark violet flower on the right, the same side Amy always positioned her bows, and an ace of spades in indigo for Rick on the left.

"That’s sweet," Brian Cunningham tells him softly, the first time someone realizes they’re not just bruises on his skull, or just something he's practicing for dexterity.

Zoe Kelly twists her hair up and adds, with her usual grim cheer, “It’s smart to have identifying markers on you, too, just in case.”

And Kieren rolls his eyes at her back, because he's pretty sure his wrists count more as an identifying marker than whatever's going on behind his ears.

On a cold morning in Lent, Simon Monroe watches him work until Kieren meets his eyes in the mirror. He puts down the brush and says, hard, “Don’t make me wear one for you,” even though he already knows what it will be: a cross, in blue.

"Yeah, all right," and when Kieren passes within arm’s reach, Simon takes his hand and kisses the heel of it, lips on him in the same way he’d spoken: rough, and with promise.

 

-

 

 **14\. October.**  
 _In the Flesh/Percy Jackson and the Olympians crossover, Nico, Kieren, Zoe, gen, warnings for a general blase Nico attitude towards death._ For Kat, who asked for "nico di angelo meets a boy named kieran walker; tell me anything about that", originally posted [here.](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/post/99380689338/) Familiarity with PJO up through Son of Neptune is suggested, since Son of Neptune is set in 2009?? I think???? I'M JUST GOING TO SAY IT IS FOR RISING REASONS.

 

"See, this is why we torch our dead," Nico comments aloud. "You could really avoid this whole problem if more people were up for barbecuing their loved ones into easy, blow-away bits."

The dude closest to him turns his head around slowly — not all the way around, unlike some of the others his head’s still mostly attached, it’s more like a Bride of Chucky slow creak — and not, like, _actual_ Bride of Chucky, that guy’s further back in line, Rick or Chaz or Todd or whatever four-letter, easy-to-remember-in-case-of-brain-damage quarterback name he had, Nico wasn’t listening.

“ _Wow,”_ the dude says, eyebrows half-way to his hairline. “That was really rude.”

Nico rolls his eyes, because whatever, rude was on his birth certificate.

“Just for that, you get to go first. Stand here, please,” he grabs him and pulls him two steps to the side, shoving him into place next to a girl with a flower in her hair and skirts out to here. They exchange a mutually exasperated look that Nico ignores. 

“There we go. So today’s date on the upper side is —” he checks his clipboard, “— December 20, 2009. Mazel tov. Or Merry Christmas. Whatever. Listen, Death’s a little broken right now, we’re having some management problems, Thanatos is, like, chilling, and I don’t want to do the paperwork, so I’m just going to go ahead and stamp Return to Sender on you guys.”

"But you’re, like, twelve," says Sassy blankly.

"Fourteen, thanks, and how old are _you,_ exactly?”

"Oh my god," mutters a Zoe from four people down. "I didn’t get shot in the back of the head for this," but when she moves to step out of line, the whole crowd suddenly vanishes — only the softest exhale of a noise marks their passing, and they leave nothing but the dark and the space and Nico.

Quietly, he says, “Enjoy your second lives.”

Then, a beat later, “You might have to dig yourselves up, though, sorry about that.”

 

-

 

 **15\. October.**  
 _Jem & Kieren, no warnings apply._ For anonymous, who wanted "walker siblings + science projects."

 

Around the time Jem turns thirteen, she actually starts fitting Kieren’s hand-me-downs, which includes a lot of black and purple and a pair of trousers with so many buckles that Jem wears them to school five days in a row and all weekend her classmates have nightmares about jingling without knowing why. Kieren’s fifteen around then, his own clothes starting to melt into browns and greys in fifty shades of "don't notice me," and there are words popping up in his vocabulary that Jem’s never heard before — “useless” and “a fucking waste” and “never going to fit in” chief among them — and during this period when nobody’s talking about it, there’s a programme on Channel 5 about DIY in the UK; a lady shows them how to do their own hair dye.

Jem meets Kieren’s eye over the sofa back, and somewhere in the house, premonition makes their dad break out in gooseflesh, and he pushes his chair back and shouts, _“NO”_ without knowing why.

The pH is off on the batch they finish, and it comes out a blazing, fire-engine red. Kieren towels his hair dry, looks at himself, and says, “Jesus _Christ”_ — he looks atomic, like the big fucking button you aren’t supposed to push, and Jem laughs herself sick.

When it grows out enough, he cuts it down to bristles, and that's the brightest color she sees on him until the day he dies.

After the Rising, she finds an unlabeled container under the sink, and she unearths its contents with confusion — gloves, cap, weird gooey substance — before memory detonates like a grenade inside her chest.

She wears it like warpaint: Jem Walker, her blue armband and her red, red hair.

 

-

 

 **16\. October.**  
 _Simon/Kieren, warnings for a self-harm reference._ For rvmnov, who wanted "Simon/Kieren, feeling  <3", originally posted [here.](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/post/100386562073)

The yell of pain draws Kieren out instantly.

Simon makes a hunched shape in the hallway, his knuckles dug into his eyes. He'd been among the last of them to change, and it had panicked him, the sight of the corpse-color in his irises steadily leeching away, because the Simon Monroe who wasn't a PDS sufferer wasn't a person Simon wanted to meet. He had to be coaxed into being cured.

Approaching cautiously, Kieren puts a hand on the back of his neck, steadying and worried both. “You all right?”

"Yeah, fine," Simon’s voice is breathless, chagrined. "Just keep forgetting to blink, so when I do, it’s, yeah," he drags the backs of his hands across his eyes and looks up — they’re irritated, bloodshot, and very brown. "Got out of the habit, I suppose."

Days later, Kieren stands in the kitchen and says “Simon, look,” with such a note of wonder in his voice that Simon’s on his feet without making the conscious decision to be there. He offers his palms, into which Kieren lays his wrists and says, “They’re healing.”

 

-

 

 **17\. December.**  
 _In the Flesh/His Dark Materials fusion, Kieren, Phil, Amy, gen, no warnings apply._ For boppinrobin, who wanted to know "WHAT WOULD SIMON AND AMY AND KIERAN'S DAEMONS BE LIKE?" So I wrote a tiny tie-in piece to [this fic.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2372315) READ THAT FIRST.

 

Phil Wilson is distractingly present — Kieren hadn’t believed him at first. “You and her? Bullshit, she hated you,” and Phil made eye contact and replied, “I think out of her options, she resented me least,” which knocked Kieren senseless like something small and feathery colliding with a tennis racquet — but he’s too busy to make a real attempt to drive him away: Amy’s will named him, Kieren Walker, inheritor of her house, her belongings, and her funeral arrangements.

He’s on the phone with the engraver, and Phil’s sheepdog daemon watches from the floor, her stare unsettling and unblinking. Her ears flick towards him every time he speaks — her name’s Ida, Kieren had learned somewhere between the clinic and the morgue. “Dyer. D - Y - E - R.”

"Dates?" asks the toneless engraver.

"1988 to 2009, 2009 to 2013."

There isn’t even a pause. “Daemon shape?”

Kieren thins his eyes, his throat stoppering up on, _She’s PDS, you moron, we don’t have them,_ but Ida must have heard the question, because Phil shouts from the next room, “A white dove!”

And Kieren stops, and then _stops,_ and he says, _“excuse me?”_ and Phil’s silence becomes charged, horrified with himself.

 

-

 

 **18\. December.**  
 _POV Outsider, OCs, Kieren, gen, no warnings apply._ I have a LOT of feelings about PDS sufferers on a global scale, so when the-strongest-hero gave me a starter sentence of "It was cold, not that they'd know it.", I decided to write about zombies in Greenland. Because reasons.

 

It was cold, not that they'd know it.

Eva, especially, used the fancy photography equipment on loan from NASA to take selfies, documenting the painstaking growth of her icicle beard and the way frost would coat the surface of her eyeballs in less than seven seconds outside — oblivious, like the cold wasn’t a thing. In this part of Greenland in summer, the sunlight was 24 hours a day, and everyone’s spirits were high: the station flew both the Danish and the NASA flag, and housed a whopping 14 people, all of them PDS sufferers (only perhaps two of whom had any scientific standing whatsoever, the rest of them seeking asylum, 13-year-old Eva included), an arrangement that really suited everyone just fine: the Department of Climate Observation got a crew down in a place that would be completely inhospitable to the Living, and the undead got somewhere they could live in peace.

The stranger came on a Friday, taking a boat across the strait from Canada. He was their first visitor since November, when they’d received a shipment with the year’s dose of neurotryptaline, equipment, and a new Kindle for Yoo Seong. 

He wore a coat, putting them all on edge because PDS sufferers don’t need coats — they shed frostbite like it’s no more bothersome than a scab — but when he pushed his hood back, he had their bone-colored eyes, their grey lips.

A beat, in which he looked at them and they looked at him, and then Eva was the first to blurt it out: “I _know you.”_

"What," said Kieren Walker blankly.

“ _Yeah,”_ and the rest of them were already nodding with recognition. ”We watch your YouTube videos! You're from Roarton!”

 

-

 

 **19\. December.**  
 _Jem, gen, no warnings apply._ For Heather, who prompted me to talk more about PDS sufferers around the world.

 

 **Name** : Walker, Jemima  
 **Year** : ZA Remedial

 **EXAM 1**  
Section C: The Rising Outside of the UK

**1\. The Rising began on 20 December 2009. Which countries were the safest places to be during this time and why? (Please write your answer on the lines below.)**

> India \- Hinduism strongly discourages the burial of its dead, preferring cremation because of the belief that it severs the soul from the body. A predominantly-Hindu nation like India saw little to no incident of Rising, despite its dense population.  
> Japan \- Same as above. Cultural and spiritual traditions, tied with limited availability of burial grounds, meant that Japan had a 99.8% cremation rate in 2009. In the world, Japan's economy suffered least as a result of the Rising, and only as a result of other countries' problems.  
> USA \- The two-month delay between the first Rising in the UK and the first recorded Rising on North American soil (in Guatemala, in February) and lax laws on gun control meant that the US was prepared for rabid attacks by the time they started happening. The US today has one of the lowest populations of PDS sufferers, because few rabids survived long enough to be treated.  
> Antarctica\- There were 2 deaths in Antarctica in 2009. If they Rose, no one found them.

**[BONUS] Which country was the safest place to BE a PDS (Partially Deceased Syndrome) sufferer during the Rising? (Please write your answer on the lines below.)**

> Bhutan \- Being small and remote, Bhutan was heavily influenced by the writings of Buddhist scholar Sonam Chunni, whose blog encouraged people to view PDS as a natural, if alternative, step in the wheel of reincarnation, citing all death to be a transformation. Coupled with the advocacy of its king and queen, Bhutan employed a Contain-Don't-Kill policy towards untreated PDS sufferers from the beginning.

**2\. What event marked the tipping point of the Rising in favor of the Living? (Please write your answer on the lines below.)**

> The creation of the regenerative drug neurotrypsaline (NTP) by the UK military in September 2010. Its rushed implementation and distribution ~~met with resistance and resentment from~~ saw a change in how the public perceived PDS sufferers, from a [illegible. "threat"?] to be [illegible] to diseased people that needed medication.

**3\. Is the Rising over? (Please write your answer on the lines below.)**

> [several illegible, crossed-out marks]  
>  ~~What is this even asking?~~ [illegible][illegible] ~~Not for~~ ["me"?] ~~it isn't.~~ [illegible][ink blot]  
>  Marina Kealohapa'ole was the last recorded Risen, buried in 2009 and Risen in the American Samoa in May 2010. No known Risings have occurred since then.

 

-

 **20\. December.**  
 _Simon/Kieren, Cherie, warnings for a suicide/self-harm reference._ mischief7manager gave me an opening sentence of "It's the third day since Keiren's heart started beating, and Simon is beginning to get nervous." Note: Cherie is the sex worker that Phil frequents.

 

It's the third day since Keiren's heart started beating, and Simon is beginning to get nervous.

"What do you think they’re going to do, Simon, shoot me?" He thinks about this. "Shoot _at_ me? Again.”

"There are worse things than being shot at," he reminds him, sitting uncomfortably on top of a pile of laundry that they’d meant to fold and put away — three days ago.

Kieren’s voice remains dry, if sympathetic. “Here,” and he deposits his hands into Simon’s hold, letting him press his thumbs into his pulse and put his cheeks against the scars, “Look, see? Nothing’s leaking. I’m fine. A bit hungry, though. Do you suppose we’ve got anything that didn’t expire four years ago?”

Simon wonders if any of the apostles had ever felt like this, exasperated and affectionate and desperate for every second in spite of it — he supposes they must have. “You can’t hide forever,” he murmurs, and Kieren responds in a subvocal mutter that sounds an awful lot like, _watch me._

On the fourth day, Cherie appears at the door with a trench coat pulled haphazardly over her leathers and fishnet, her eyes as wide and luminous as moonrise. “I didn’t know where else to go,” she says — to Kieren, her eyes registering Simon and then sliding right past him. Kieren goes to her immediately, and she catches his hand and puts it to her neck, right underneath her jaw, where her heart beats fresh blood again.

 

-

 

 **21\. December**  
 _Simon/Kieren, Frankie, Shirley, warnings for implied child abuse._ For oneshykitten, who gave me the starter sentence of, "When the truth comes out, Simon expects Kieren to hate him, but all he does is close his eyes and say, “Simon, you’re a moron.”" Note: Frankie Kirby is the only Sad Dead Teenager who DOESN'T get killed or go rabid.

 

When the truth comes out, Simon expects Kieren to hate him, but all he does is close his eyes and say, “Simon, you’re a moron.”

For a moment, Simon actually contemplates getting offended. Really, the least he could do is take the news of his own failed assassination seriously. “I’m trying to tell you I was ordered to kill you.”

Kieren doesn’t look any more impressed by this than he did a moment ago. “Yeah,” he says, eyes popping open again. “But you didn’t, so.”

He stops walking, backing up a few steps in order to scan the ground with purpose. It takes Simon a moment to realize he isn’t going to say anything more. “That’s it?”

An affirmative noise floats up from beneath Kieren’s hood, and then he straightens up again, a good-sized chunk of cement in hand. He hefts it around, testing the weight. Simon blinks, and blinks again, and suddenly pays attention to where they are: Upper Roarton, where the two-levels become three and the yards get bigger. He doesn’t recognize the house in front of them, until he does — Frankie Kirby has slept in Amy’s old room for the past three nights, and Simon has carefully not been asking why. He is, after all, still just a guest in that house. Shirley Wilson came round with an informational booklet that outlined what legal rights Frankie had as a PDS sufferer, and how she’d go about prosecuting her murderer, if she wanted to go that route. Simon looks at the rock in Kieren’s hand, and then at the Kirbys’ front windows. “What are you doing?”

"I’m about to commit the crime for which I’ve already done house arrest," Kieren tells him calmly. "Are you with me?" And that, honestly, is a very stupid question.

 

-

 

 **22\. December.**  
 _Jem & Kieren, Steve, Amy, gen, AU, no warnings apply._ For Katya, who gave me an opening sentence of "It doesn't occur to him to ask why Jem already had a duffle packed until they've left the village border long behind, and by then Kieren is pretty sure he can figure it out." [WALKER SIBLINGS ON THE RUN AU.](http://against-stars.tumblr.com/post/100202803733/felled-in-the-night-by-the-ones-you-think-you-love) It's my favorite and this is no means a comprehensive view of it, that's all you really need to know.

 

It doesn't occur to him to ask why Jem already had a duffle packed until they've left the village border long behind, and by then Kieren is pretty sure he can figure it out.

It won’t sink in, not for another month or so, that they’re homeless, and the whole sum of their world inevitably telescopes down to this: the holster at Jem’s hip, the swing of her ponytail in front of him, the strap of the duffel bag cutting crosswise like a bandolier on his chest, their boots with the tired choked tongues lined up against the wall whenever they feel comfortable enough to take them off. Everything had to be found in these things. They’ve no other way to remember — that changed the night Steve Walker stood at the curtains and said to his only daughter, “Jem,” with a bar of light carved onto his face. “Plan B.”

Jem stopped, one hand still fisted in Kieren’s sleepshirt. “But —”

“ _Now,_ Jem,” said Dad, and in the other room, the chainsaw coughed to life, almost but not quite covering the sounds of engines outside and somebody’s voice, canted up in a raucous laugh.

Lost, Kieren looked between them — who the fuck were these people? Were those _fucking nails_ sticking out of a _plank of wood?_ What the fuck was Dad expecting to do — and it struck him, easily, the image of Steve Walker turning and swinging and making pulp out of his brains, and Kieren stepped away from his father without meaning to, bumping the china cabinet.

It drew Dad’s attention, and Kieren caught a glimpse of the fear on his face, absolute naked terror, and then, suddenly, everybody moved.

Jem flew at their father, accepting a tight, one-armed hug and a kiss to her forehead. 

“Go,” he murmured. “We’ll buy you the time.”

"What —" Kieren tried, but Jem tore herself away and descended on him, her face contorted enough to cut. She manhandled him backward, shoving him on his unsteady legs, making only one stop: the cabinet where they keep his meds. One-handed, she swept his injector gun, the rattling boxes of vials, and a — a taser? The _fuck?_ — into the bag sitting innocuously on the shelf below.

The bag went onto Kieren’s shoulder, and then, almost before he could process it, he was outside, and the last glimpse Kieren Walker would get of his home for the next four and a half years was this: his mother, poised by the back door with her sleeves rolled up; the edge of his father’s shoulder moving through the kitchen; and their dinner plates still on the table, the water in their glasses shivering from their fast departure, his place setting gone as if he never was.

*

"How many plans were there?" Kieren asks, frowning up the wall. 

For a long moment, there’s no answer, and he thinks it’s deliberate -- until a puzzled “hmmmm?” rises from the general vicinity of his armpit, and no, actually, his sister’s just asleep.

With an exasperated noise, Kieren fishes the end of her ponytail out from under her, pulling it around to tickle at the parts of her face that present themselves; her ear, a bit of her nostril, until she slaps at him and pulls away, saying indignantly, “All right, fine, ‘m awake, _what.”_

"How many plans were there?" he repeats. "If the car in the woods was plan B, what … were … the others?"

"I’unno," blurs out of her, and she nudges his arm around the way other people move pillows, making herself comfortable again. "There were a couple. But that was, like, over a year ago, Kier. Plan A was to sell the house and we'd all defect with you to some tax-exempt holding in the Channel Islands. That one didn’t work. Plan C involved turning you in for fast execution —" and Kieren half-lifts a hand, not wanting to hear, but it’s like trying to stop a knife when it’s already in your ribs. The precision of it cuts into him neatly. "— because it’s not like you wanted to be here anyway, and at least you could stay dead this time."

A pause, and, because there’s no way she can’t feel how he’s tensed up, she adds, quieter, “We were too selfish for Plan C, Kier.”

He swallows around the cut-up feeling in his throat.

On the other side of the closet door, the industrial-sized dryers tumble, the occasional loud thunk of a buckle or zipper in the well as familiar a noise as a neighbor. Gregor’d had a bad reaction to a homecook dose and took a team effort to subdue, and so several of them needed the black bile washed off their kits before their shifts tomorrow. _We’ll be laundering late, Walkers,_ Nita warned them, slinging her hair back up off her neck, unselfconscious about the scar. She’s called Nearly Headless Nita for exactly the reason you’d think she’d be called Nearly Headless Nita. _You’re always welcome to bunk down with the rest of us, get out of that foxhole for a bit if the noise bothers you._

The answer, of course, had been no thank you.

Kieren shifts his chin along the top of Jem’s head, which she takes as permission to say lightly, “One of the plans involved a goat.”

"Really?"

“ _No,_ you dafty.”

"You rehearsed them, though. You had’to’ve. You moved like — it was rehearsed. Why go to all the trouble?"

"Maybe it was Mum and Dad’s version of cover-up mousse. They got to pretend that you’d just been away for a bit, that’s all, and they were the same _normal_ people they’d been. That we were all _normal._ They got to pretend that they didn’t live in Roarton, where the neighbors come and break your doors down with shotguns — it —” she shakes her head, bumping his throat. “It doesn’t matter, the plans don’t _matter,_ they were all the fucking same anyway. Keep Kieren. Just — _keep_ him, whatever it takes.”

"Jem …"

"No, fuck off. I’m not talking about it anymore." She shoves her face into his shoulder pointedly, throwing her arm around his ribs and arranging herself to go back to sleep.

Kieren squeezes her back, and tries not to think about Norfolk, where when the doses weren’t sliding down right and the physical therapy was at its most frustrating, they kept asking, _who are you looking forward to seeing? Who are you going back to?_

So if Jem’s answer had always been Kieren, then Kieren’s answer has always, _always_ been Jem.

*

For Boxing Day that year, the Prophet arranges a day trip into town — the anniversary of the Rising had been the week previous, so Julian the First Disciple makes a special trip out to supervise it, half to stop anything from happening to them, and also half to stop _them_ from doing something. They are the ULA, after all.

They take extra care with Jem’s make-up that morning, wrapping her in a half-dozen layers to try and hide her tell-tale warmth. Thirty-five of them are going altogether, and it’ll be hard for Jem to avoid contact with _all_ of them. Fortunately, they’ve had practice.

The trip is for shopping, and sightseeing, and attending market to trade sheep and farm equipment — things PDS sufferers are _allowed_ to do by law and kept from in practice.

"You don’t have to come," Kieren tells her, after she turns down breakfast with a queasy frown.

Their closet off the laundry room is only large enough for them to spread their arms fingertip-to-fingertip, so he has to step out of the way to avoid getting elbowed as she pulls her head through Simon’s jumper — though on her, it’s more of a dress than a jumper, which is probably the point. Amy lent them a blouse and her bright yellow cardigan, which are, frankly, very fetching on Kieren and will succeed in making sure people look at him, not his sister.

It’s unlikely anyone will come in while they’re gone -- there’s nothing in this room except the drainage hole in the floor and the pipes and the cobwebby shelves they’ve taken over with their stuff, but they haven’t kept safe this long by banking on unlikelys, so they take care to hide certain things: Jem’s food, her grey make-up, her HVF armband, her hip holster, the Colt and the shotgun and Mum’s taser, all shoved into the duffel bag buried under a casual pile of their clothes.

"Yeah, I do," she says, and lifts her chin. "Oi, are my eyes in straight?"

"You look a proper rotter," he informs her solemnly, and she claps a hand to her chest in mock offense, hissing, " _language,_ Kier!”

They leave the commune after morning prayer in a pleasant, nondescript bus (he doesn’t know why this keeps surprising him, what is he expecting — “UNDEAD LIBERATION ARMY” in bold letters?) and while the other PDS chatter amongst themselves, Kieren and Jem watch the countryside of Gwynedd flatten out towards the coastal towns.

Briefly, Kieren meets Amy’s eyes over the seatbacks. She looks nervous. It’s one thing for Jem for pretend to be PDS on the commune, where they can at least anticipate all the complicated factors that go into hiding all of Jem’s living habits from the people who will toss her out for them, but it’s another thing entirely for Jem to return to living civilization _still_ disguised as one of them. She’s never been on that end of the discrimination.

Amy frequently wonders if she should point out the obvious solution.

They could separate.

Kieren could stay on the commune where he can get the medication he needs, and Jem could apply for veteran’s benefits and live nearby. It’s not impossible. Most of the ULA here are estranged from their families, but not everybody. It wouldn’t even be unheard of, them keeping close contact.

It might be obvious to her, but she doesn’t think it’s even _once_ occurred to them. 

She faces front again, squaring her shoulders and resolving to keep a close eye on those Walkers today. They’re a bit precious to her.

She promptly loses them in the supermarket.

She’s sniffing shampoos, because honestly, if this is the hair she’s going to have to live with for, oh, _ever,_ she’d better take care of it, and when she looks up, they’re nowhere to be found. The only people around are a pair of Irish backpackers arguing over an end display and a clerk, who’s eyeballing her and gripping his mop with prejudice.

She curls her lip. “What are you looking at, pulse-beater?” she sneers, and brushes past him.

She checks all the aisles, but they aren’t there.

Abandoning her basket, she darts out into the carpark. She spots a few of their own — the commune supports itself through … whatever the Prophet does unmasked, but also through the sale of their wool, which they shear, process, and dye themselves. Most sales are online, but there are a few intrepid individuals who hawk in carparks whenever they take day-trips.

She rounds the corner of the building, and —

There they are. Slid down to the tarmac, they’re huddled up against each other, her own bright cardigan and Simon’s silly jumper giving them away. They’ve got their hands knotted between them. They tremble.

"Walkers?" Amy tries, approaching gingerly. She looks at the expressions on their faces, their wide gravestone-colored eyes, and whittles down her explanations. "Flashbacks?"

"Yeah," goes one Walker. "We’re not very good —"

"— with supermarkets," finishes the other.

"Thought it’d be better, but —"

"God, we’re a fucking mess," and they dissolve helplessly and hysterically into giggles, shaking their heads. "Can’t even go into the fucking shops."

Amy can guess what set them off, and knows that saying “well, it doesn’t bother _me,”_ is just going to make them mad.

"Well!" she says brightly, and sweeps her skirts to the side so she can sit down with them. "We’ll just stay here, then. Make a party of it, yeah? Till you feel better, or we go home, or — whatever."

"Thanks, Amy."

 

-

 

 **23\. September.**  
 _Kieren/Rick, Bill, Janet, warnings for the Macys in general._ This was actually part of a larger fic that I had to scrap, but I also liked it too much to truly get rid of it. So, here, a Rick study from 1x02.

 

Here's something you didn't know you knew: the word "rotter" actually got its start in the army _before_ the Rising. And once the dead started coming up, the soldiers' slur caught on and spread.

Well. "Slur." Rick Macy's the sort who believes you should call it what it is. If it's a rat, it's a rat. If it's a girl who slags around, it's a slag. If it's back from the dead, it's rot. Rotten, rotten, rotted, he thinks, turning it over and over in his head like a stone. He has his own hands trapped in a chokehold, strangling them, and across from him, two soldiers he doesn't recognize watch him with assault rifles in their laps. He doesn't recognize the weapons, either, but he's been out of commission for three years. He looks out the window instead, watching the city give way to countryside. The dells emerge slowly out of the landscape.

Here's what he remembers: the bunch of them sitting around at camp outside Fallujah, taking the piss out of each other and talking about the things they missed the most; pot roast and their dogs and 2-ply and their mums, and every sarcastic response was met with a chorus of groans and a "piss off, you rotter."

Rotter, rotter, rotted.

Here's what he remembers: the homesickness. Oh, God, the homesickness -- a terrible ache, stomach-deep, for Mum and that bamboo chime hanging outside by the screen door, clunking with every breeze, and the way the hills in Roarton Valley rioted with heather in the spring (he didn't have any strong feelings about heather, like, academically, but his mother used to stand out on their back porch and breathe like the sight of it gave her peace, and Rick misses that, Rick misses that like a hole in his heart.) 

On the worst nights, he'd imagine his homecoming.

He imagined it again and again -- what he'd say to Vickie Burns, what he'd say to his dad, how he'd hold his head if his dad's mates tried to cause trouble. He imagined Roarton seeing him in his uniform for the first time. He imagined what he'd say about the medal, the protection that would provide: who cares what that Rick Macy gets up to, he's a decorated soldier, he is. 

He imagined surprising Ren Walker. He imagined he wouldn't have to say anything at all.

Again and again and again, lying in his cot in Fallujah and then in Baghdad, again and again, until his chest felt like a lightning rod, picking up every bit of love and homesickness and grief in a ten-mile radius.

He wanted, so badly, those small things: the windchime and the heather and the comfort of Ren's neck. His homecoming became the destination of every stray thought, the fantasy of it grown worn under his questing fingertips. The details of it grew, blooming like mold in the crevasses of his brain; a bomber got Jarl Irving from the west county half-way into February, blew him to pieces, and Rick sat on his cot after and scraped at his forehead with the heels of his hands and thought to himself, _I'll tell Ren. I'll tell him. I have to tell him._ The sand got into his boots and his armpits and his hairline, and the Internet was too unstable to call home, and they said maybe they'd be here another year, and Rick thought, _I don't know what Ren's mouth tastes like. I need to go home. I need to find out._

He blew into shreds and woke up in a facility in Baghdad with a hundred twenty-seven other sad bastards lying around in pieces, and Rick probably thought a few other things first, like _where am I?_ and _how many pieces do you have to be in before you just don't wake up?_

But the first thought he remembers thinking is, _Fuck this, I en't got the time. I'll do it when I get off the train. I don't fucking care who's there to see it, I'll kiss him right there in front of God and everybody and they can kill me right then if they had to, that'd be a goddamn way to go._

And fuck, fuck, he could almost feel it; how Ren's skull would feel in his hands. His mouth. He'd kiss back, Rick has no doubt.

It took seven surgeries to put Rick Macy back together. He's got an arm and a leg that had to be bolted in, screwed into a socket, and where some people have an abdominal wall, Rick's got wire mesh and black polyethylene (which is just a fancy way of saying 'black garbage bag.') His face looks like something Tim Burton would doodle on a loo roll, and they had to teach him to talk again. His jaw's brand new, reconstructed to the best of their ability from a photograph of Rick from Preston. He's got to sit with flashcards and say it slowly, _cat_ and _book_ and _fish._

But he gets through speech therapy, he gets through physical therapy, he gets through the flashbacks. He grits his teeth and he bears it, because all that matters is going home.

He's going to go home and he'll kiss Ren on the platform.

It's a buzz in his veins. It's fizzy and delirious. Won't Ren be surprised? Isn't this fantastic? Everybody's probably already given him up for dead. There might have been a funeral, but that doesn't matter. He's going home.

He'll kiss Ren as soon as he lays eyes on him. Ren'll kiss back. There isn't a doubt in Rick's mind that Ren won't care about the eyes or the stitches. He won't care about the medicine or the limp. He won't care. In what possible universe would his best mate care about those things?

God, he deserves that much, doesn't he?

The vehicle slows, taking the turn onto the country road that'll take them down into Roarton Valley. Rick's hands tighten on themselves. Across from him, the soldiers exchange a look.

There's only one flaw in Rick's plan. Just the one, and he'll find a way around it, he has to.

When the fellow from the UK Embassy came to inspect them (there'd been about twelve or thirteen UK soldiers at that Baghdad PDS facility -- the rest of them, as far as Rick could tell, were either located elsewhere, or they'd been taken out while rabid), he spoke to them all individually. The lemon trees were in bloom, dotted with white flowers, and he sat Rick down on a bench under one and he sweated as he told him that his parents agreed to be his primary caregivers.

"What does that mean?"

"It means they're responsible for you. For your care and continued support."

"So I have to stay with them?"

"Yes."

"I can't … I have to stay with them?"

"Yes," the Embassy fellow repeated, impatient.

Rotten, rotten, rotted.

If he has to live with his mum and dad, he'll … he'll have to be Rick Macy, their son. He'll have to. He knows them well enough to know what their opinion on rotters will be, and Rick Macy's a rotter now. They're not going to like it. He'll have to play everything perfectly.

He'll make it work.

He has to.

He'll adjust and he'll make it work. He and Ren, together, they'll make it work.

The certainty of it carries him the rest of the way home.

It carries him through the sight of Roarton strung up in barbed wire, shotguns slung across the backs of every civilian, Jem Walker in combat boots with metal in her lip, her brother nowhere to be seen. The certainty lasts.

It lasts until the moment his dad takes a casual bite of his sandwich and says, "Nah. Killed himself."

And Rick catches it like a bullet in the teeth.

It starts in his throat and works its way down as he swallows, swallows, swallows again. Each second becomes buckshot, gulped down and tearing him up.

In his chest, he feels ruptured, split, like if he pulled aside his uniform he'd see a crater, a demolition site of ribs and necrotic grey tissue, and that sensation of impact spreads on through, until Rick feels rotten, rotten, rotted, decomposed and buried and monstrous all at once, every inch a rotter. Rotter, rotter, rotted. Here it is, here he is.

_Killed himself, killed himself._

_Ren._

_You stupid fuck, Rick, did you even once consider he'd anywhere but here, waiting for you. You stupid, stupid fuck._

In an effort to feel just a little less, he picks up the gun, aims it vaguely, and lets it roll until the clip runs out -- he frightens his mother, his father, the rats in the tall grass and the roosting birds.

It all flutters in his peripheral, fast as blinking, fast as Ren's heartbeat had been under his palm, the first and last time he ever touched him just to feel it. Ren is not here. Ren is not _here._

The bullet he swallowed becomes a boulder and Rick Macy entombs himself beneath it. It becomes his gravestone, and the epitaph to explain him reads simply:

 _Kieren Walker_ and _Killed himself._

 

-

 

 **24\. December**  
 _Jem, Lisa, Kieren, Amy, AU, no warnings apply._ So the universe put Katya and I together in the same place at the same time, and since this was a TERRIBLE IDEA on the universe's part, we drank a lot of coffee and came up with this whole mob AU thing, where Simon's a hitman and Amy's a mob doctor and Kieren tries not to get involved with their shady Family and fails. So here's the opening for a fic I may or may not finish. YOU MIGHT SEE THIS AGAIN.

 

Her older brother has been dead for ten months when Jem Walker sees him at Piccadilly, in Manchester. They're changing lines at the same time.

She'd been eight years old when they finished the refurbishment, and in 2010, Piccadilly Station still has a sharp, _new_ look that flattens her every time she passes through: it's a soaring, open space, with shining floors and clusters of students with overlarge backpacks clogging the stationside shops and queueing at the toilets. Overhead, a voice announces the next departure to London Euston. The large screens above the platforms play the same clip on loop, showing the updates on the stadium being built for the upcoming 2012 Olympic Games. It's sure to bolster Manchester economy and community spirit, they say. Those are the keywords, aren't they? Anything to repair the economy.

Jem watches it until her eyes glaze. Beside her, Lisa tears at a pack of Jaffas and says, "-- worries, mate, we'll find another drummer, it can't be that hard."

And suddenly, through a part in the crowd, she sees him.

It's not the first time, but it's worse when she travels -- too many people in the world have the back of Kieren's head, the same discount Primark hoodie with the check plaid, the same defensive way of shifting his weight to his back foot. They appear like ghosts in her peripheral, arresting her where she stands.

She's almost succeeded at tamping down the initial rush of recognition, and this time is no different: already, grief compacts in her stomach before she even registers _who,_ exactly, has caught her attention.

Her head turns, following them as they cross the terminal -- a young couple, coming close enough that she can hear they're speaking a French she only passingly attempts to eavesdrop on -- and next she knows, she's on her feet, her stomach pitching.

"-- Jem?" Lisa cuts off, alarmed.

She moves.

People weave back and forth in front of her. High above, the glass panes in the ceiling catch at the light, and an overhead announcer informs them about line closures in blackout areas. She strains to hear their voices, catching the woman saying something about never bathing. Her lungs feel strained, stretched too thin inside her chest.

As they veer unerringly towards the platforms, Jem catches him in profile, and it's like an impact. She almost trips, winded.

Kieren Walker died ten months ago during a Roarton blackout.

He'd wanted to be cremated, but for lack of anything to cremate, they'd buried an empty coffin -- Mum and Dad had already changed their will and testament, wanting to be buried in the same plot.

Her brother died ten months ago. He's currently scanning his ticket through a reader, London-bound.

Jem stops walking.

He sees her then. For a fraction of a second, he turns her head and looks right at her, she swears.

 _It's not him,_ the rational part of her brain tells her. Kieren has light brown hair and light brown eyes and stands marginally taller than the average person; throw a stone in a crowded room and you'll hit ten people who look like Kieren.

She drifts closer, and it's like the world telescopes down. She sees across impossible distance, sees minute detail.

It can't be him. His eyes are wrong. They're the wrong color.

 _Contacts,_ she realizes in the next startled beat of her heart. They have to be -- nobody's eyes are that uniformly brown. Kieren's were brown and grey and green, all at once.

Kieren.

 _Kieren._ It gets caught in her throat. She wants to see the back of his neck. She wants to grab him by the hood and yank his collar down and make _sure_ his neck is clear. She wants to hear her name in his voice -- they have home videos, sure, static clips of Kieren's voice, but they're lacking certain important things. They don't have video of the way Kieren mimicked those Walkers adverts for crisps. They don't have video of the way he said "Jem" when he meant it, unselfconscious and delighted and not at all the way he sounds when he knows he's being recorded.

She wants it to be ten months ago.

She wants him to say good-bye.

The woman scans her ticket through, stepping up to his side, and Jem focuses on her for the first time.

Her stomach plunges into freefall.

Dr Dyer puts her bag down at Kieren's feet, and Jem's brother oblingingly helps her into her coat; he must not have seen Jem after all, because he's smiling, unconcerned. She arranges it over her shoulders, pulling it snug into place and fishing her hair out from underneath it. There's a moment where she flips it over her back and Jem sees, clearly, the black ring at the back of her neck. The Family mark.

She loops her arm through Kieren's, stowing her ticket in her pocket. He says something, and she grins, dropping her head onto his shoulder.

Jem has never been more certain in her entire life.

" _Jem!"_

Lisa catches her arm, weighed down by the cases and bags she'd hauled across the terminal. "What are you --"

She grabs back at her, yanking on her arm so hard she nearly unbalances her. She points.

A group of Euston-bound tourists cross in front of them, and when they clear, the platform on the other side of the turnstiles is clear. Dr Dyer and Kieren have vanished.

"What?" Lisa's eyes tick, baffled.

No, really. They've disappeared. She grips Lisa's arm, vice-like, like it's the edge of a cliff and Jem's dangling over nothing.

She knows, though. She knows.

"He's alive," she gets out, and can tell from the way Lisa's face changes that she knows what Jem's talking about, and has decided what she thinks of it. "Lisa, I just saw him, I'm sure of it. He's alive." The next leap of logic isn't hard. "The Family's got him."

 

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
